Social Media

August 04, 2010

Andrea Saveri has spent her career as a futurist, doing forecasting and probing ambiguities of things to come. In her keynote address, she speaks to IFVP members about the ambiguous and complex landscape that we are living in, populated by black swans, wicked problems and cognitive surplus.

She emphasizes that organizations are forced to plan for a future that they don't understand in a present that is influenced by vast, complex systems.

March 11, 2009

For all of your artists or artistic types wondering if what you make, makes a difference. You are not alone.

Music video for Tanya Davis' song Art by Andrea Dorfman.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.--Carl G. Jung

May 21, 2008

In working with many diverse groups of people, coming together to solve complex problems, I am absolutely flummoxed by this paradox: young minds struggle with complex, inter-related problems, while "more mature" minds struggle to learn new concepts.

Rather than throw both brains out with the bathwater (what a badly mixed metaphor!) how best do we design collaborative projects and discussions that accommodate all brains, whether wily, worldly or wise?

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

January 27, 2008

The power and flexibility of a network--whether a simple group of casual neighbors or a complex next generation communication network--depends not just on the number of connections, but on the quality of the nodes, and more important, the type of nodes. Below is a fantastic intro to the concept of graphs and networks. It helps in understanding the a social graph and how it differs from a social network.

January 14, 2008

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling
debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using
extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation.
The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex
global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian
countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better
national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national
income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global
trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become
clear, intuitive and even playful.